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Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)
I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.
The reason capitalism is the most productive economic system is Darwinian creative destruction as new ideas outcompete old ones, often in the form of churning enterprises. People hate this. Even the winners typically hate this. Schumpeter predicted that social democracy, even if it didn't seccumb to Marxism, would inevitably destroy capitalism by turning to a quasi-socialist mush as voters replaced a culture of dynamic entrepreneurship with "laborism" -- i.e. the philosophy that the point of the economy is to make life as cushy as possible for workers rather than products as good as possible for consumers.
America's greatest achievement is keeping the entrepreneurial spirit relatively healthy. In much of the rest of the advanced world its essentially dead. In Canada, we live in a corporatist state and the best research on the subject shows regulation and corporate cronyism is the reason our GDP per capita has slid from 85% of the U.S. level a generation ago to 70% today.
So the role in unions in fostering “laborism” is clearly bad in my opinion as it robs us of economic growth, but I do sympathize with the desire of people to get out of the economic rat race. Many people want to get their credential, get a secure job with a pension and then put their career and livelihood on autopilot until age 65 so they can raise their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. Some people just have extreme risk aversion or grew up in precarious financial circumstances and seek out these jobs.
I just think those jobs should be paid less than market wages, not more.
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